Thursday, December 6, 2018

The Mara has a wonderful way of
knowing exactly what you want and keeping it from you. Whether that thing is
rain (yes there are times when we’re literally begging for rain), to have an uneventful
drive back to camp without surprise elephants, or an exciting carcass session
after seemingly endless obs periods without anything eventful, if the Mara
hears that you want something, she (yes the Mara is a woman) will do her best
to keep it from you. Except for one recent incident.

Last month
was characterized by obs period after obs period of the same old routine. This
is not to sound ungrateful by any means, every day in the Mara is unbelievable
and a true blessing, but from a research standpoint the hyenas weren’t giving
us much to work with. Not to mention the overall lack of rain (and thus lack of
mornings in) was leaving all of us exhausted and in need of something new and
exciting. That wonderful new and exciting thing practically fell into our laps
on November 16th. Earlier that day I had been talking with Allie
about how tired we were and how I wouldn’t be upset if it ended up raining that
evening since “the Mara hasn’t really given us anything exciting lately.” A few
hours later, to our disappointment the rain never came and we went out for evening
obs. We were about to wrap up our den session at one of the Talek West den when
we hear one hyena whoop in the distance and all of our adult females at the den
(Pisces, Atacama, Amazon, and Hilton Hotel) tore off in the direction of the
whoops. Soon after their departure we heard a chorus of whoops coming from that
same direction, became rather curious, and decided to check out what all the
excitement was about.

To our
surprise and delight, we found that Ziti and some other Talek West males had just
brought down a full grown wildebeest. However, despite their best efforts to
feed the clan, they made one crucial mistake. They had killed the wildebeest
right on the borders of Talek West and KCM territory. We figured it was only a
matter of time before some KCM hyenas heard foreign whoops on their territory
boundary and came to investigate. So we stayed to find out, and sure enough, no
more than 5 minutes after our arrival we saw the first of many KCM hyenas –
lead by their fearless matriarch Princess Buttercup – come loping down the
hill. What ensued was a clan war, but this time territory lines were not the
only thing at stake. This time the winning clan also got a fresh (and fairly
untouched by hyena standards) wildebeest.

For the
next 45 minutes in the pitch black of the Mara night with only our headlights
and dying MagLites to aid us, we watched each clan strategically rush and route
the other to gain brief access to the wildebeest carcass. For most of the clan
war it seemed like KCM was winning, which we speculate was due to the fact that
they had a solid and established matriarch to lead the charge while Talek West for
the most part fumbled in their power vacuum. That is, until Decimeter, one of
the daughters of the recently deceased Buenos Aires arrived on the scene. With
Decimeter there Talek West was seemingly more eager to make stronger and more
frequent charges toward KCM and secure longer stretches of time on the carcass.
While this one instance isn’t enough data for us to conclude that Decimeter is
the new Talek West matriarch, it certainly allows us to speculate that at long
last, the power vacuum is starting to disappear.

55 hyenas
and 3 exhausted research assistants later, the clan war finally concluded,
however the winner remained unclear. To our knowledge the clan boundaries haven’t
changed, and at the end of 45 minutes the wildebeest had been reduced to
nothing more than a hollow hide and bones. The entire drive back to camp we
couldn’t stop gushing about how much data the past 45 minutes had given us and
how serendipitous it was that it all practically fell into our laps. Despite
being absolutely exhausted by the events of the past 45 minutes, upon our hour
late return to camp all of us couldn’t wait to wake up early the next morning and
commence the obs process all over again. That’s the great thing about the Mara,
while she withheld from us what we initially wanted, she ended up giving us
something so much better.

Due to restrictions on the size of the file the
website allows us to upload, I was only able to upload a minute long video of some
of the highlights from the first 10 minutes of the session. I apologize for the
brevity, but I hope it suits all of your possible hyena carcass/clan war needs.

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